The present disclosure relates generally to a method for the planning of cardiac interventional procedures and in particular, to a method for using data created by a medical imaging system in cardiac interventional procedure planning.
Medical diagnostic and imaging systems are ubiquitous in modern health care facilities. Such systems provide invaluable tools for identifying, diagnosing and treating physical conditions and greatly reduce the need for surgical diagnostic intervention. In many instances, final diagnosis and treatment proceed only after an attending physician or radiologist has complemented conventional examinations with detailed images of relevant areas and tissues via one or more imaging modalities.
Currently, a number of modalities exist for medical diagnostic and imaging systems. These include computed tomography (CT) systems, x-ray systems (including both conventional and digital or digitized imaging systems), magnetic resonance (MR) systems, positron emission tomography (PET) systems, ultrasound systems and nuclear medicine systems. In many instances, these modalities complement one another and offer the physician a range of techniques for imaging particular types of tissue, organs, physiological systems, and so forth. Health care institutions often dispose of several such imaging systems at a single or multiple facilities, permitting its physicians to draw upon such resources as required particular patient needs.
Modern medical diagnostic systems typically include circuitry for acquiring image data and for transforming the data into a useable form which is then processed to create a reconstructed image of features of interest within the patient. The image data acquisition and processing circuitry is often referred to as a “scanner” regardless of the modality, because some sort of physical or electronic scanning often occurs in the imaging process. The particular components of the system and related circuitry, of course, differ greatly between modalities due to their different physics and data processing requirements.
Medical diagnosis and treatment can also be performed by using an interventional procedure such as atrial fibrillation (AF) intervention. Approximately 2.2 million people in the United States have AF. It is the most common arrhythmia and is the most troublesome. It is currently the number one independent cause of stroke in the United States. The incidences of AF increase with age, rapidly increasing after the age of sixty. In the case of left atrial fibrillation, muscle tissues around any of the four pulmonary veins (PV) which connect to the left atrium (LA) can sometimes generate an extra electrical signal causing AF. One current clinical treatment for this condition is ablation using a special catheter which is positioned into the left atrium to create small lesions by administering heat near the origin of the problematic electrical signal. Ablation therapy is done routinely during open heart surgery in less than one hour, but it is very difficult and timely using the less invasive catheter procedure.
In the example of ablation therapy, the following procedure is typical. First, a catheter is position into the LA, guided by X-ray fluoro, this takes approximately one hour. Next, a crude 3D geometric representation of the LA and PV ostiums (openings) is acquired using 3D positioning information from a special catheter by attempting to “sweep through” the space of the LA. Acquiring a crude 3D geometric representation typically takes about one hour. The next steps are performed in the following order as many times as necessary. A special catheter is used to acquire electrical information from one or more heart cycles and this electrical information is mapped onto the crude 3D geometric representation using interventional system software. The next step is to visualize this map in order to identify the areas of concern which should be treated with ablation. Heat is then administered to create lesions, as the software keeps track of these locations. The last step is to recollect the electrical map to see the effects of the lesions. If necessary to complete the ablation therapy, the process continues with repeating the previous steps starting with using a special catheter to acquire electrical information. The ablation therapy procedure is lengthy and labor intensive.